Will Kirk, star of BBC’s The Repair Shop, faced a particular challenge when guest Tracy Emery brought in her grandfather’s dessert wine holder, which had charred under the heat of her kitchen lamp.
Tracey went into the barn and placed her wooden cooking pot, which had been in the family for years, on the table. She explained, “It’s a wooden cooking pot, so it was a wooden cooking pot. It’s actually a dessert wine holder, so it opens! It holds a bottle of wine, but it’s had a little accident.”
She added: “He was sitting in the kitchen under the countertop light and someone turned the light on and he got a little burned. The only thing left intact from the top was the face, which is amazing because that’s the best part.”
Kirk was keen to know who was responsible for the fire, to which Tracey clarified, “Well, we don’t know 100 percent, but we think it was my dad. I was gone for two nights and they wanted to watch my cat, and he didn’t like my cat being left in the dark, so he turned on the light under the counter and left it on overnight. When my mom came back in the morning, they found it burned.
“But we were very lucky that only this and the light were damaged, and I’m very glad that it didn’t catch fire anywhere else. For me, that’s unfortunate because it’s one of my favorite objects,” sobbed Tracey.
The guest further explained that she had inherited it from her grandfather after he and his wife had bought it for their then pub and placed it on the food counter.
She added: “When my grandfather died, my grandma asked if we made a wish and of course I said the wooden chef. He just sums up my whole childhood for me and when he sat in my kitchen, it was like my grandfather was still telling me his stories.
“I actually keep the speech I gave at his funeral in the wooden cooking pot. That’s what’s kept in there. (Dad was) incredibly guilty, he was the one who wanted to get it fixed for me because he knew how much it meant to me,” the owner of the item explained.
“Unfortunately, he got sick and passed away about a year ago, so fixing it now has an extra meaning because we all now have a memory of him trying to fix it and it was the one thing he couldn’t do before he died. Please do your best, bring back his stories,” she pleaded.
When Kirk brought the wooden cook to his workbench, he examined the piece and confessed, “This is in really bad shape, I’ve never seen anything so charred on my workbench. I’ve never had to restore charcoal before and this is essentially what it is.”
“So I know the face should go there… oh my god, so I’m missing a ton of wood, basically a whole section of the top of the hat is missing and some parts of the outside. So I need to glue what I have here back together in a way that I can figure out what’s missing.”
In the latest episode, jeweler Richard Talman was given a broken silver ring by mother-daughter duo Halina and Lesley. The ring was given to Halina’s mother during World War II as a token of gratitude for providing food to families trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
Leather expert Suzie Fletcher met Gordon and his sons James and Ross, who brought with them a pair of curling stones that their father had used in the triumphant 1979 Grand Match.
Angelina Bakalarou was tasked with restoring an old poster of the Bollywood film Sholay, while Kirk was given the daunting task of repairing charred wood for Emery.
The Repair Shop airs on BBC One and is available to stream on iPlayer.
